


Don't Pick Me Up (I don't dance)

by shiptoomuch



Series: 30 McKirk AUs [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, M/M, Pickup Lines, this is stupidish but kinda really cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:16:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiptoomuch/pseuds/shiptoomuch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is a dancer with a crush. Leo is *not* in love with him. There are a few pickup lines involved.<br/>Carol Marcus is adorable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Pick Me Up (I don't dance)

**Author's Note:**

> sorry this is soo bad

It happens in a grocery store, of all places. He walks up to him with a gym bag slung across his body and sweatpants low on his hips. His hair is messy and there is a sheen of sweat on his forehead. His flip flops slap on the floor and Leo thinks that no responsible adult should ever wear flip flops in public and immediately brushes him off as someone who is obviously too immature to actually function in society.

“Hey, do you have a bandaid?” He says with a worried look on his face.

“Um, probably. What’s wrong with you?” Leonard immediately starts rifling through his pockets for the bandaids that he knows he has.

He puts a hand on Leo’s shoulder and grins, shaking his head. “Do you have a bandaid? Cuz I scraped my knee falling for you.” He winks and his smile brightens even more than Leo thinks possible.

“Are you kidding me. Why is this happening to me.” Leo shrugs his hands off his shoulder. He tries to turn and walk (run) away from this kid with blue blue eyes and something about him that shines (Leo hates himself) like a freaking sun.

“No! Stop!” He runs after him and Leo cringes at the sound of flip flops on tile. “Look, my name is Jim. My friend Carol dared me to talk to you because I’ve seen you around and...actually yeah I should stop talking.” Jim drums his fingers on his arm and casts his eyes back nervously towards a blond girl who is pretending to look at cereal with great interest.

“Seriously, kid. Why are you even dressed like that?” Leonard follows Jim’s line of sight to the girl, who is dressed in shorts that look like they’re made out of a garbage bag and a loose fitting pink shirt. “Is there some sort of ‘dress like homeless people’ party tonight?” 

Jim laughs too loudly for a grocery store and Leonard wants to slap his hand over his mouth and tell him to shut up, but something stops him. “No, we’re dancers. We’re actually on snack duty this week so we’re just here buying a ridiculous amount of weird food. It’s really funny because Nyota totally loves like, potato chips and candy but her boyfriend, Spock, only ever eats hummus and carrot sticks. Our teacher, Chris, though, he totally has banned us from-I am talking way too much and I really really need to go.” Jim turns on his heel and practically sprints away from Leo.

Leo hopes to god that he never meets him again.

-

He does see him, but Jim never talks to him. He just runs away in the opposite direction. He does, however, seem to run into a plethora of dancers after that. He finds out who Nyota and Spock are. He meets Pike. All of them give him really weird looks. A few of them talk about Jim endlessly, dropping hints and slipping the kid’s phone number into his pocket.

It’s obvious that he has a crush and they all know about it. Leo almost wants to feel bad about it, but when he thinks about those blue eyes, the long legs (that ass), and the stupid pickup lines and jokes that he hears about, he can’t help but almost want to give in the pestering.

Carol basically stalks him and Leo actually starts becoming friends with the psycho ballerina. She shows up to his house and he doesn’t know how he found out where he lives but he’s too distracted by the pizza she’s holding to really get too upset.

“Hey, hotpants.” She grins and pushes past him into the door.

“How did you find me?” 

Carol looks back over her shoulder and winks. She puts the pizza on the counter and gets two beers out of the fridge. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, dear. We’ve got important things to talk about. Mind if I use this wall?” She tilts her head to the side, blond hair falling out of her ponytail.

“What on earth do you need a wall for?” Leo decides he doesn’t really want to know after all and waves awkwardly at her with a piece of pizza. “Go ahead. Don’t break anything.”

Carol backs up about two and a half feet away from the wall and lifts her right leg up above her head gracefully, something that he’s come to learn that most dancers do a lot. She places the foot on the wall so that she’s in a perfect split and Leo thinks she’s done with whatever she’s doing but then she does something incredible. She does something that, as a doctor, Leo knows should never happen. She pushes her hips forward so that she is in a position in which her legs go past a 180 degree angle. He cringes. “Why?”

“It feels great.” She grins and rests her head on her knee. “Speaking of great things, do you know what would be totally great?”

“I’m not going to date Jim.”

Carol sighs and takes her leg down, jumping up and down in place afterwards. “No. Not that, although you two would be great and he never stops talking about you.” She levels him with a glare to match no other. “I was wondering if you could bring me lunch tomorrow? It’s your day off, I know because I hacked your phone, and I really would just love love love you if you did this for me.”

She smiles sweetly at him and Leo cannot resist this girl who has charmed her way into his fridge and into a friendship with him. It’s a completely platonic thing, of course, (Carol’s boyfriend, Scotty, scares him only because he can’t understand half of what he says.) but she’s a nice girl, the kind of girl his mother would have wanted him to end up with. “Fine. What do you want? Mac n cheese from Panera?”

“Um, no?” She starts wringing her hands nervously and Leo is immediately suspicious. “A number six from Jimmy John’s. Extra avocado.”

“You don’t like avocado.”

“I’m broadening my horizons?”

-

Leo shows up at the dance studio at noon precisely and immediately feels like the most ungraceful, awkward, too big person on the planet. Dancers pass him by and giggle into their hands. A few girls wave at him and scurry on their way, covered in sweat and whining about blisters. One girl has obviously bleeding feet and still looks more graceful than him.

“Hi, Nyota, I’m here to deliver lunch for Carol?” He holds up the Jimmy John’s bag with an awkward smile. “Where should I go?”

Nyota raises an eyebrow and smirks. “Oh yes, Carol told me you were coming. Just walk down that hallway. First door on the right. Private rehearsal time for an upcoming solo.” She points towards the hallway and nods. “On your way. Don’t be loud, no street shoes on the studio floor.”

Leo nods and starts down the hallway carefully. He turns toward the door and stops at the view he gets through the window. Jim Kirk dancing around the room with a sort of liquid grace that seems impossible. Leo watches him move around the room before turning the nob and walking in after toeing off his shoes. “Um, I’m here to deliver this for Carol. Do you know where she is?”

Jim stops dancing and screams and jumps up in the air. He whirls around and lights up when he sees who it is. “Oh! Hey, Bones! You scared the crap out of me. Carol told me you would be stopping by with food. She’s in Chicago with Scotty right now, actually. Didn’t she tell you?”

At that moment Leo’s phone buzzes with a text from Carol telling him exactly what Jim just said. He holds up the phone and smiles a bit. “Yeah. She actually just did. I thought this was for her.”

“Oh, well, you can just leave it, I guess.” Jim looks up hopefully. “Unless you want to stay and watch me rehearse? I’ll be done in twenty minutes and then we could maybe grab coffee or something?”

“I don’t dance, kid. I’m wrong for your world.” Leo turns on his heel and walks out.

-

It becomes a thing. Leo brings Jim dinner/lunch/what have you, and Jim asks Leo out. Leo turns him down. They talk, Jim invites him to see him dance, Leo declines.

But somewhere in there they form a friendship. Jim turns out to be really funny and Leo cannot remember a time when he actually laughed so hard he cried.

Jim glows when Leo walks into a room and Leo tries to convince himself that his day doesn’t improve when Jim starts talking to him. They talk, Leo insists that he doesn’t love the kid. It works for him, everything in a careful balance.

Of course, that all changes the day Jim says, “Wanna watch me rehearse?” and Leo lets out a “Yes” before he can stop it.

-

Leo watches Jim dance for the first time and it’s like magic. He floats, always seeming to be a half inch above the ground with each step that spins, twirls, throws him across the room with both reckless abandon and extreme precision. The music lifts him up and throws him back down.

The glow that Leo noticed on the first day they met seems to intensify. Leo feels a pang of disappointment when Jim stops dancing and grabs new shirt from his gym bag, switching shirts quickly and giving Leo a quick glance of perfectly toned abs and a smooth golden chest.

“Alright. I’m ready and starving.” Jim offers his hand to lift Leo up from his place on the ground. “There’s a park down the road with an awesome little ice cream shop near it. Wanna go there?”

“Gee, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were asking me out, Jim.” Leo (with more help from Jim than he’d like to admit) stands up, still feeling like a drunk baby deer. 

“And what would you say if I was asking you out on a date?” Jim smiles and raises an eyebrow.

Leo takes a step closer to Jim and tangles their fingers together. “I’m not a photographer, but I can picture you and me together.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback appreciated!  
> tumblr: fabtrek  
> I AM ACCEPTING AU PROMPTS PLEASE SEND THEM IN PLEASE I LOVE YOU ALL.


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